Excerpt from Yellowstone: A Natural and Human History, Yellowstone National Park, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming

While 19th - century Americans prized Yellow stone's wonders for their curiosity, they also valued them as manifestations of natural processes that might expand human horizons. The l870s saw the establishment of us. Geological surveys as well as the park. One of Yellowstone's main explorers, Ferdinand Hayden, was a government geologist. Members of Congress would not have voted to pre serve Yellowstone if it had seemed only an infernalamusement park. They were well aware of the deeper implications of all that steam rushing forth from the ground and water crashing over falls - such forces drove industrial development then. Geology was a cutting-edge science of the mid-19th century. Geol ogy then was like space exploration would be to the mid-2oth century, and the Yellowstone area was its Mars. Yellowstone was that faraway, alien place where theories could be tested by observing natural forces still at work in spectacularly pristine ways. This noble deed may be regarded as a tribute from our legislators to science, Hayden wrote about the park's creation.

The new way of regarding the Earth was not con fined to geologists and legislators. The fur trapper Joe Meek expressed it in rudimentary but vivid lan guage in 1829. Meek likened one of Yellowstone's geyser basins to the industrial city of Pittsburgh. Three young frontiersmen who explored the region 40 years later echoed Meek, calling one hot spring concentration the chemical works.

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